Quotes About Civil rights

Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ears of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."

The Negro's great stumbling block is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice,… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.

The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

The tortuous road which has led from Montgomery to Oslo is a road over which millions of Negroes are traveling to find a new sense of dignity. It will, I am convinced, be widened into a superhighway of justice.

The Negro was willing to risk martyrdom in order to move and stir the social conscience of his community and the nation… he would force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly, with the rest of the world looking on…. Nonviolent resistance paralyzed and confused the power structures against which it was directed.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness."

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement; one elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: "My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest."

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.

Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.

Is it legitimate to eliminate 'terrorists' outside the due processes of law? How far should civil rights be sacrificed in the interests of homeland security? The Romans never ceased

As recently as 1991, the Supreme Court upheld a Washington State ruling outlawing peyote. Freedom of religion, as I said before, seems to apply only to whites. For

The law's not for colored people, not down there .

The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.

National security was invoked so freely that the First Amendment had become an empty promise.

There are hundreds of sanctuary jurisdictions across the country. Some left-wingers use the dreadful euphemism "civil liberties safe zones" to describe them. The phrase blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S.

JIM CROW LAWS WERE ENFORCED IN MUCH OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH FROM 1877 TO THE MID-1960S. THESE LOCAL AND STATE LAWS KEPT BLACK PEOPLE AND WHITE PEOPLE SEPARATE.